The Battle Lines Are Forming On Family-leave Bill

March 19, 1989|By Mary Beth Franklin.

More than 100 organizations, ranging from the Women`s Legal Defense Fund and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights to the U.S. Catholic Conference and the AFL-CIO, have joined to support legislation requiring employers to grant unpaid family and medical leave to their workers.

``This coalition, with its solid grass-roots component, stands in position to sway undecided congressmen and senators`` to support the bill, said Phil Sparks, speaking for the group.

``It is a fairly clean and easily-understood concept: Working parents don`t have to choose between a job and child,`` Sparks explained recently.

``It doesn`t include federal money and it doesn`t affect our industrial competitiveness, since our competitors have (leave) policies that are at least as good.``

House and Senate committees already have held hearings on the Family and Medical Leave Act and hope to have it ready for passage by May. The bill would require employers to allow parents of newly born, newly adopted or seriously ill children, or workers with seriously ill parents, to take unpaid leave. It also would provide unpaid leave for workers with a serious illness.

The Senate bill would grant 10 weeks of unpaid leave for child care or parental care and 13 weeks for illness in any company with more than 20 employees. The House bill would grant a 15-week medical leave and would cover only businesses with more than 50 employees.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the legislation on grounds that it is an undue government intrusion into private business decisions and may open the floodgates for other mandated benefits like employer-provided health insurance. The business group also says it is impossible to estimate the potential cost of lost productivity and training of a temporary replacement during a worker`s absence.

Grass-roots lobbying is the name of the game for both sides. Christine Russell, director of the Chamber`s Small Business Center, has issued an

``action call`` to the organization`s 184,000 members, urging them to oppose the bill in letters to their senators and congressmen. ``I think the grass-roots response is just going to start about now, and there`s going to be lots of it,`` Russell said.

Mimi Mager, who coordinated the successful nationwide lobbying effort to defeat President Ronald Reagan`s nomination of conservative Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, is in charge of the campaign for the family and medical-leave bill.

``(The stop Bork campaign) was the first time we worked together at the state level, and it was extremely instrumental in forming a coalition,`` said Mager. ``We`re building on that now.``

She supplies interested organizations with fact sheets on the legislation, answers to commonly asked questions about the bill and technical data on forming and expanding coalitions at the state and local level.

Mager said strong support among organizations at the state level would help persuade undecided members of Congress in Washington how to vote. ``It shows we`re not just a bunch of Washington lobbyists,`` she said.